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It’s been a while since I last posted and a lot has happened between then and now. Most important is a new work assignment that will be exploring the use of virtual reality environments for instructional purposes at the university- and college-level. I have my own personal project that aligns with this assignment, which I will be blogging
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When I was an associate professor of German, one area of program growth I was keenly interested in was language for specific purposes (LSP), otherwise known as a “Business German” or “German For Your Career” track. By making tangible connections between what students learned in the German program and internship or employment opportunities after graduation,
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It has been a while since I last posted on my research blog. Since then I have moved across five states and two time zones to accept a new position as Digital Liberal Arts Specialist in the Digital Liberal Arts Collective (DLAC) at Grinnell College. Our mission, as is explained on our website, is to “help the
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I have always liked projects as a way of organizing and directing activity. They allow me to set personal goals, to measure progress towards this goal, to learn new technology skills along the way, and to create new knowledge through experimentation and analysis of the product. So, after a few years of not having any long-term
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Although the topic of digital game-based learning and gamification did not make this year’s New Horizon Report (it was mentioned in the 2014 report), I was happy to discover an interview with EDUCAUSE President and CEO, Diana Oblinger, in which these instructional approaches were mentioned first on a list of three trends that will impact
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I found out just the other day that I have been accepted to participate in a Digital Humanities Summer Institute on Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in June 2015. The institute coincides with a project that I have been meaning to get back to
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I read an interesting article today on NPREd about free online courses (MOOCs) and what was learned when the data generated by 1.7 million online students in EdX. Although I read the report earlier and was already familiar with the findings, I was particularly struck by what some people wrote in the comments: In many ways, these
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I have been teaching the same introductory German sequence for, oh, 8 years now and yesterday I finally came to the conclusion that I need a change. Really bad. I want to spend more time in class actually working on important skills – speaking, writing, discussing cultural artifacts – and less time on covering grammar. I
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I have been making progress on the medieval city wall that will surround the fictional town of Bad Oberdinkelheim, which will help to keep player-learners in a controlled space while simultaneously granting them an unfettered sense of agency. While creating the wall I have stumbled across another type of workflow. Whereas before I created the
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The last game I created was done under time pressure: It took me roughly 1.5 years to learn 3D modeling and texturing in Blender, game programming in Unity, and get the instructional materials created in time to teach the the topic of German waste management and recycling systems within the context of two-way prepositions. Oh,
